I found journal after journal filled with dense pages of cramped handwriting. I flipped through them at random to begin with. Many of the entries were pretty innocuous – just recordings of weather reports and fuel levels and sea conditions. But there were strange entries that came up several times. More than one keeper had seen white hands pressed up against windows or mirrors. Many reported weird goings-on inside the Strangers’ Room and an unease about the mirror hanging there. And several keepers documented the birds acting oddly, or even violently. Even more alarmingly there were reports of the keepers acting violently towards each other too, in sudden and out-of-character ways.

Eventually I found the log of a man called Gerald Hartley. He’d been one of the last two keepers on Bird Rock in the 1970s, and his partner 195was John Porter – Cailean’s grandfather, whose log I’d already read bits of. When I discovered Gerald Hartley’s logbook, I saw that he often doodled little drawings in the margins.

They were pictures of gannets mostly, and sometimes seals or the monks’ stone bothies on the other side of the island. But there were also, oddly, drawings of an old woman that started to appear in the pages too. She was a fearsome-looking being dressed in rags, with straggly grey hair that trailed down her back, and crooked black teeth gaping from her mouth. In fact, she was hardly a person at all – her eyes were just dark pits in her face. For some reason, she was always shown kneeling by the edge of a stream, washing clothes. I flicked back to the first drawing of her and read Hartley’s accompanying entry.

196I frowned down at the page, remembering my own nightmares and unsettled by the reference to the Strangers’ Room. The entry continued:

With a jolt, I recalled the soft melody I thought I’d heard in the fog, just for a moment, last night. I peered closer at the keeper’s drawing – a stark charcoal sketch. The woman looked almost inhuman with that snarling mouth and a face that was more like a skull. 197

Suddenly I heard a thump down below and froze. Dad had said they were going to be out all afternoon. Had they come back early? The next moment, the door swung open to reveal Will on the threshold.

I breathed a sigh of relief. “Oh, it’s you. I thought my family had come back.”

“I saw them on the clifftop.” Will stepped into the room. “What are you still doing here? I hoped you’d all be gone by now. Didn’t you find your sister?”

My heart suddenly lifted. If Will remembered that I’d been looking for Rosie, then might he actually remember her too?

“Do you remember her?” I asked eagerly. “Rosie, I mean.”

He frowned. “Well, how can I? I’ve never met her.” 198